Peter Handke’s Time-Traveling Tale of a Europe in Flux

Peter Handke commands one of the great German-language prose styles of the postwar period, a riverine rhetoric deep and swift and contrary of current. Since the first of his 100 or so books of fiction, poetry, essays and plays appeared in 1966, his talent has been inarguable, and yet it’s almost exclusively been a talent for the aesthetic. No one has ever read Handke for his ideas, but for his hostility to ideas; his ambiguous pronouns (have “we” become “they” again?), ambivalent punctuation (his infamous “(?).”) and that petulant, didactic way he has with provocation. Previous generations of the Germanosphere had sought a Nationaldichter — a Goethean laureate of nation-state vindication — but the war generation had inverted that yearning into a call for writers of chastisement, of self- and governmental punishment. It’s not a shock that the best of this cohort would hail from Catholic Austria: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek and Handke, who was born in 1942 in Carinthia, a heavily Slavic province of Austria, in a town just over the Drava River from Slovenia.

The Drava, Sava, Drina and especially the Morava — all Danubian tributaries — define the banks and the binds of “The Moravian Night,” which was published in German in 2008 and might be the most important novel of Handke’s career. Its title is also its setting. The Moravian Night is a houseboat — a Haus-und-Fluchtboot, “a house- and escape boat” — belonging to a “former writer” who’s familiar, or familiarly inscrutable, from Handke’s previous work: He’s the Handke-who-isn’t, the author’s epithetical double. Also known as “the abdicated writer,” “the boatmaster,” “the host” — he lives on the run, or on the rudder, in perpetual flight from reporters, women and “Pan-European” tax assessors. Just before Eastertide, under a full moon, he drops anchor outside the village of Porodin, “the last enclave in the Balkans, and in Europe as a whole,” and welcomes onboard a gaggle of locals to serve as both audience for, and auxiliary narrators of, a Last Supper dedicated to recounting his life: “There were not more than six or seven of us, corresponding, so to speak, to the hours stretching ahead, the episodes, the chapters of the night, until morning.”

Note the distancing technique, which is also a disclaimer: Handke’s writing about a “former writer” giving an account of “himself,” and becoming drowned out by the voices of apostolic friends who, because they weren’t around to witness the original scenes, or sins, can only repeat, and contradict, with rumor and gossip. The “former writer” reminisces about revisiting the island in the Adriatic where he wrote his first book, and about encounters with his brother, and with a writer colleague who’s become a hack journalist; he recalls a journey to the Harz, the erstwhile border between East and West Germany, and to an academic congress on noise pollution. Interleaved with these scenes are long stretches regarding the long treks taken by the “former writer” through the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia, in which the novel’s submerged plot comes up for air; namely, the ways in which the contemporary world, or the contemporary Balkans, have betrayed Handke, or just failed to live up to his imagination:

“Ah, you and your damned neo-Balkan inadequacy, obtuseness, mediocrity. Things had not always been this way, had they? At one time no voices more animated, no eyes more wide open, no gestures more inclusive than could be found among you. What had happened to your eloquent gaze, your eloquent shaking and rocking of heads, your eloquent sighs?”

Both Handke’s biological father and his stepfather served in the Wehrmacht; his mother was a Slovene, a wary foreigner in Austria. After her suicide in 1971, Yugoslavia — historic homeland of the South Slavs — became a maternal surrogate. But despite Handke’s peripatetic visits, he never seemed to know it, or never seemed to know it as anything other than a figment or delusion. Coming from Austria, or Berlin, or from his regular residence in a suburb of Paris, Handke would apostrophize the Socialist Federal Republic as “the Balkans” — a multiethnic paradise of farmers whose hearts were filled with wine and song; untainted by the trappings of capitalism. Handke took this false consciousness public just as reality collapsed; in 1991, publishing a screed against Slovenian independence, and over the next decade of constant war, churning out a spate of ostensibly nonfiction texts that veered from pedantic critiques of the media coverage (which, he claimed, refused to hold Croats accountable for the persecution of Serbs during World War II) to raising doubts that read like denials (of the then-unfolding Serbian massacres of Bosnian Muslims). Indeed, Serbia — whose Belgrade had been the cultural capital of Yugoslavia — became Handke’s cathexis. He accepted accolades from President Slobodan Milosevic, attended the mad butcher’s trial for war crimes at The Hague and, in 2006, delivered a eulogy at his funeral.

The more the European press assailed and censured Handke, the more defiant he became, as if in a perverse attempt to remind Austria and a reunified Germany of the type of radical, independent, infuriating writer they had once relied upon to de-Nazify their culture and re-establish civic life. In “The Moravian Night,” Handke simultaneously escalates and surrenders that campaign. He still refuses to apologize, but now on strictly artistic grounds: To admit error or express regret would be too bourgeois. Handke’s “former writer” didn’t abandon his profession to pursue a political truth, but a political emotion; an entire odyssey of enchantment and disabuse. His Yugoslavia was never so much a country as it was a symbol of himself, which is to say a symbol of literature, or of the European Novel — the last proud polyglot redoubt of a noble dream, which reacted so volatilely to the threats of technology and Islamization that the pious gods of NATO intervened, divided it parochially and bombed it into rubble.

The “former writer” finds the Balkans that emerges from the fogs, toward the conclusion of “The Moravian Night,” unrecognizable: a fractious patchwork of new alphabets and towers, repopulated by strangers equipped with smartphones, whose “comportment clashed with his conception, or his will? his ideal? his idea? — his sense of a narrative based on all he had just witnessed.”

Handke has written a poignant book almost despite himself, or to spite the day, out of the grim confusion of his ruins.

Correction:

A review on Jan. 1 about “The Moravian Night” referred imprecisely to the parentage of the novel’s author, Peter Handke, and incorrectly to the military service of his father. Both Handke’s biological father and his stepfather served in the Wehrmacht, but both survived World War II by many years; it is not the case that “Handke’s father died as a soldier in the Wehrmacht.”